My dad was a big fan of the former Prime Minister of Canada, John Diefenbaker. When I was in high school, I sent a letter to John Diefenbaker on behalf of my class to ask him to speak at our grad. When he sent a letter back saying that he couldn’t make it, my dad told me, “You should frame that letter.”
Sometime later, my dad was at a political convention and one evening, as things were winding down for the night, one of his friends asked him if he wanted to come down early the next morning and have breakfast with him. My dad decided that he wanted to get some extra sleep and declined. The next morning, my dad came down to the restaurant as breakfast was winding up. He went over to say good morning to his friend, and would you like to guess who he was having breakfast with? John Diefenbaker. So my dad missed out on having breakfast with one of his heroes because he wanted to get a few extra minutes of sleep.
There is something like that, but far more serious, that can happen to each and every one of us. We can become so focused on the ordinary things of life that we miss out on the extraordinary, even supernatural, things that God is doing in the world around us and in our lives. There is even a joke about this. A man was doing some last-minute Christmas shopping on December 24. The parking lot was crowded and he needed to get his shopping done before the stores closed that day. So he prayed, “God, please help me find a parking spot, please, please, please help me!” Just then, a parking spot opened up before him and he called out, “It’s okay, God! I found one.”
I don’t know about you, but I do this all the time. And when we miss out on what God is doing, we miss out on opportunities to know him better and to live the greater life that he has for us. So how do we stay alert to what God is doing so that we can grow in living our life with him? To help as we reflect on this question, we are going to consider Moses and an encounter he had with God as recorded for us in Exodus 3:1-17. If you have a Bible or a Bible app nearby, I invite you to turn there now.
God Calls Moses to Deliver His People
In a previous post, I invited people to reflect on the life of Joseph and how God worked through the evil intentions and actions of his brothers to bring Joseph to Egypt and accomplish something wonderful and good, the saving of many lives. The Pharaoh of that time was very grateful to Joseph and what he had done, but many decades passed since, and eventually a new pharaoh came to power, to whom Joseph meant nothing. Worried about the growing number of Jacob’s descendants, now known as Israelites or Hebrews, he had them enslaved and forced them to work on extensive building projects. The Egyptians were brutal taskmasters and life for the Israelites was harsh and bitter.
Still the population of the Israelites grew. So the Pharaoh ordered his people to throw into the Nile River any baby boys born to the Israelite slaves and let the baby girls live. And so, the line between slavery and genocide was crossed.
One Israelite mother sought to save her three-month old son by weaving a basket and waterproofing it with tar. Then she put her son in the basket and set it in the Nile River. Her daughter, Mariam, watched over the basket as it floated down the river and into some reeds along the water’s edge. As Pharaoh’s daughter walked along the riverbank on her way to bathe in the Nile, she saw the basket and had it brought to her. When the lid of the basket was lifted to reveal the Hebrew child within, the princess became enamoured with him. At this point, Mariam made herself known and offered to get a Hebrew wet-nurse. The princess agreed and thus the baby’s mother was paid to nurse her own son. When the child was weaned, he was taken to the Pharaoh’s daughter and became her son, and she named him Moses.
Though Moses was raised in the court of Pharaoh, he was very much aware that he was an Israelite just like the many slaves who toiled and suffered under Pharaoh’s harsh rule. One day when he was out and about, Moses saw an Egyptian slave driver brutally beating an Israelite slave, so Moses killed the Egyptian and buried his body. (Moses tries to break up a fight) He thought that he had gotten away with it, but the very next day, when he tried to break up a fight between two Israelites, one of them said, “Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian? (Exodus 2:14) Moses had to flee for his life because, when Pharaoh found out, he tried to have Moses killed. Moses escaped to Midian where he met the family of Jethro, also called Reuel, and married one of his daughters, Zipporah. Throughout all these years, God was still concerned about his people back in Egypt and the harsh treatment they were experiencing at the hands of the Egyptians.
One day, as Moses was tending the sheep of his father-in-law, Jethro, out in the wilderness near a mountain called Horeb, he noticed something very unusual. He saw a bush that was on fire, but it was not being consumed by the fire. As he approached the bush, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.” (Exodus 3:4)
These are the same words spoken by Abraham, Jacob, Samuel, Isaiah, and Ananias when God called out to them. There is something about being addressed by God by name that causes us human beings to stop, take stock of who and where we are and who it is that is calling us and simply say, “Here I am.” It is not information that God needs because he knows who and where we are. When we are in the presence of divine holiness, we are the ones who need to pause, remember who and where we are, and simply acknowledge, “Here I am”. All the other things which previously gripped our attention and seemed to be so important to us have been cast aside, and we are ready and willing to listen and receive whatever God has for us.
God warns Moses not to come any closer and he tells him to take off his shoes for the ground on which he is standing is holy. The presence of ultimate holiness, that is God, has made it so.
God then tells Moses three things:
- he has heard the cry of the Israelites and he will rescue them,
- he will bring them into a land of their own which he promised to give to them, and
- he is sending Moses to Pharaoh to bring God’s people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.
Let’s pause for a moment and think about this: God has just told Moses that he is going to send him, a murderer and a fugitive who looks after sheep in a remote wilderness, against the absolute ruler of the most powerful nation on earth at that time, and take away his source of free labour. Pharaoh has nation of people and a well-equipped army at his command and Moses has, well, nothing. It is not surprising that Moses responds by saying, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” (Exodus 3:11)
God promises Moses that he will be with him. And confirmation of that promise will come after Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt when they worship God on the mountain where all this is happening, Mount Horeb.
The Significance of God’s Name
Moses then asks God the most important question in this entire exchange.13 Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:13-14)
Moses recognized that, if he was going to go to the Israelites claiming authority from God to lead them out of slavery in Egypt, they will want to know which God Moses is referring to. The Israelites were suffering horribly under people who worshipped a vast array of gods, like the sun god Re or the goddess of fertility and motherhood, Hathor. They certainly were not going to listen to anyone who claimed to have authority from the gods of their oppressors. The only possible way that they would listen if it was the God of their forefathers—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—who sent Moses.
But there is probably another reason why Moses asked that very important question. He wanted to know for himself who it was that was calling him to go back to Egypt and confront Pharaoh. And he wasn’t asking because he wanted to send him an email and be sure that it would end up at the right place. People in ancient times knew something that we seem to have forgotten in our time, and that is when you know someone’s name, you know something important about who they are. They didn’t have search engines or social media where they could look people up, they didn’t have pens and paper to write things down. They had to remember names with their mind and the names that stuck in their minds were the names of people that they knew. Even in our time, would like to guess how many people the average person knows well enough to trust? It’s only 10 to 25 people.[i] We might remember a lot of names, but we only really know a few people.
The importance of names ramps up exponentially when it comes to God because we humans tend to use a generic name for God, but who are we actually referring to when we use the term “God”? Years ago, I heard a university chaplain share a story about a young woman who came into his office and said, “I have decided to be an atheist.” The chaplain asked her, “Oh, why is that?” She replied, “Because I cannot believe in a God that causes a planeload of people to crash in the ocean.” The chaplain responded, “Well, I must be an atheist too, because I don’t believe in a God who would do that either.”
We don’t usually use God’s name, but the God that we believe in is the same God who appeared to Moses from the burning bush. His personal name is Yahweh, which when translated into English means “I am who I am,” or “I will be who I will be.” Both translations have this sense of existence being at the core of who Yahweh is. But the latter translation also implies that Yahweh is a God of action. And this active nature of Yahweh is important because his actions reveal who he really is. (crossing of the Red Sea) Yahweh promised Moses that he will be with him, that he will rescue his people from the hand of the Egyptians, and that he will bring them out of that land and into a land of their own, a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
Yahweh is a God who “… defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you…” (Deut. 10:18). He is “…close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:18). “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. (Isaiah 42:3). He had compassion on his people who were suffering in Egypt and he did something about it.
But he didn’t send in a large army from a competing superpower to defeat the Egyptians and rescue his people. He sent one person, and he was a criminal and an outcast. This person had no weapons to fight with and no soldiers to command. All that Moses had was faith that the particular God that spoke to him from the burning bush, the God with the name Yahweh, would be with him and work with power through Moses’ weakness to accomplish the great thing of setting his people free.
God Works Through Our Weakness
This is what our God does, he works his power through our weakness to accomplish great things, and he has done this throughout human history. It is confounding to us humans because we inherently believe that we must have great power to accomplish great things. And human beings can use power to accomplish great things. But the greatest things, the most beautiful things, the truest things, they all require God.
And God chooses to work through human weakness because that is what we need to happen for us to realize that it is actually God who is doing the really good things all along. Confronted with the realization that God is actually the One who is making the good things happen in this world, our internal compass shifts from a self-centered focus, which is our natural bent, to a Yahweh-centered focus, and our eyes open up to see the rich, full, abundant life that we have in and with him.
Yahweh has Delivered Us
That change in focus and abundant life are both gifts from Yahweh. They come about because of work that he is doing in us. And Yahweh gives us those gifts because, centuries into Moses’ future and centuries back into our past, Yahweh worked through the weakness of another human being. Like Moses, this person had no weapons to fight with and no soldiers to command, but he had compassion on all the people in the world who were suffering because of their slavery to sin. And this was no ordinary human being, this was the great “I am” in the person of God the Son, who came into this world and healed the sick, the lame and the blind.
He hung out with the outcasts of society, the prostitutes and tax collectors, and welcomed them into the family of God. He taught people about life with God and how to enter into it. And then he took our place and was beaten, whipped, stripped naked and nailed to a cross to suffer and die. He took the deepest valley of human sin, guilt, shame and suffering upon himself and absorbed into his own human body. And when he broke its power to condemn us, this God-human, Jesus of Nazareth, gave up his life and died. And proof that Jesus had fully paid for the forgiveness of all sins arrived on the third day that followed when Jesus rose from the dead fully alive. And he promised to give that same “fully alive” life to everyone who knows him by name and trusts in him.
Growing With God
So how do we stay alert to what God is doing so that we can grow in living our life with him? The answer to that question is Today’s Challenge.
First, believe that God is with you, and second, believe that he is able to work his power through your weakness to accomplish great things. And you will get to know God better and go deeper into life with him by watching what he does. Because the Good News of Jesus is that the holiness of God has come to live with ordinary people like you and me. Amen.
(This message was shared at Walnut Grove Lutheran Church in Langley BC on January 28, 2024. for more information about WGLC, please go to wglc.org.)
[i] Andrew Gelman, “The Average American Knows How Many People?”, The New York Times, February 18, 2013 (Internet; available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/the-average-american-knows-how-many-people.html; accessed January 23, 2024).
Farewell to Shadowlands 